The Lab
The challenge
Paperless, digital monitoring and reporting solution for social services provision, which relieves the burden and saves time on social service providers and users. It enables individual and summary real-time records and overview of the provided social service, aggregation of data for reporting.
The context
Tech goal is to create an app which will help social service providers (CPUK) better, digital, more up-to-date, and faster keeping records of the provision of social services. Currently, information about the provided service is collected in paper form – Geronto housekeepers keep their own records, collect signatures from social service beneficiaries and then submit all papers to the CPUK monthly. After that, the data is processed, and a summary report is made. Also, manual data processing takes a lot of resources from CPUK. The whole monitoring-reporting process set up in this way is not agile enough – a full overview of the provided service is visible only at the end of the month, which greatly reduces the possibility of faster and more up-to-date monitoring and response to possible challenges when providing the service, and it also slows the reporting that CPUK is obliged to do to other stakeholders.
Relevance
A digitized process of monitoring and reporting on the provided social service would greatly reduce the workload of individual CPUK employees, especially the director. A more up-to-date overview of the service provision would also allow optimization and possible quick reactions when the service provision needs to be changed – for example, the assignment of additional Geronto-housekeepers to certain users or in the absence of a certain Geronto-housekeepers, review of individual and total workload of Geronto-housekeepers, review of the situation and comparison with contractual obligations for each individual beneficiary of social services, etc.
Prerequisites and boundary conditions
- Low level of digital literacy of Geronto-housekeepers Implement – user-friendly on-boarding process for Geronto-housekeepers, offer training sessions, and provide ongoing tech support to address any challenges or concerns, user friendly GUI/app.
- Procurement of digital tools – or other devices which will be used to monitor the provision of the social service should be durable, connectable to the internet.
- The data to be collected should be easy to manage, processable, searchable and comparable.
Possible solutions
An application that records social services provision:
- User-friendly interface for digital devices (tablets, mobile phones…).
- The application enables planning and (generates) the weekly schedule of Geronto-housekeepers per user (considering the contracted service depending on the user) and turns it into a weekly work order.
- After each provided service, Geronto-housekeepers register in a few clicks which services, at what time and with which user they provided the service.
- After the Geronto-housekeepers record the provision of the service, users can confirm and sign on the spot which service they received.
- The collected and signed data are automatically stored online and are searchable – they can be easily selected by different categories like user, type of service provided, date, Geronto-housekeeper that provided the service, etc.
- The application can also generate (local or online) summary data according to the previously mentioned categories (e.g., total time of service duration for one user or overall, type of service provided, etc.).
Excluded technologies
Expensive, hard to use, close environments.
Existing technologies / system to integrate the solution
CPUK uses basic digital solutions – MS Windows, MS Office, collaborative tools – there are no restrictions, but digital solutions and the environment (cloud or local) should be simple and cheap.
What else do we need to know?
Considering that the user’s personal data is collected, the solution should also include ways to protect personal data.